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Saturday, April 4, 2015

EASTER: THE RISING OF THE CRUCIFIED GOD

EASTER

In the eyes of the world, the death of Jesus was the death of God; for
the apostles, it was the death of their hope and salvation.The Trinitarian drama of self-giving love did not end in the emptiness
of death on Good Friday but rather rose to the fullness of life in Easter
Sunday.

The death of Jesus on the cross as the ultimate sacrifice offered to the
Father was not in vain.The Father
accepted, sanctified and transformed that sacrifice into New Life by raising
His Son from the dead through the Holy Spirit. The Paschal Mystery was
continuously unfolding: from the scandal of the cross to the emptiness of the
tomb; from the total abandonment in hell to the explosion of the light and
life!

The resurrection was both earthly and heavenly; in fact it was the event
that connected heaven and earth as one.As both earthly and eschatologicalevent that happened within and beyond human history, it grafted man’s
story into the “history of God”.

There are only two aspects of our belief that distinguish Christianity
from all other religions: our belief in
the Trinity and the cross.We believe
that the Paschal Mystery endured by Jesus in his passion, suffering and death
was also the action of the Father in and through the Holy Spirit.It was the manifestation in creation of the
boundless love of God expressed in the pain and death of the Son.For us the greatest unfolding of the Trinity
is the cross:the self-emptying of the
Father in the abandonment of his Son; the unwavering obedience of the Son in
giving back to the Father everything he received in gratitude; and presence of the Holy
Spirit that connected the Father and the Son in their total forsakenness. Jesus
on the cross represented the crucified Trinity!Jesus hanging on the cross without earthly beauty and despised by the
world as a useless criminal was the most beautiful image of God we can ever
have!

Incarnation is the Father’s gifting of his Son to be part of and to save humanity; Easter
is the Father’s ultimate gift of his crucified Son back to humanity in his
transcended glory!It is the total
transformation of the all that is ugly and un-godly into something greater and
beyond than we could ever thought of.It
transformed creation back to its “christic form” that includes every man and
woman until the end of time.

The beauty of the resurrection is not only seen in the glorious body of
Christ but also in the wounds that never healed even after its
transformation.Those wounds in his
hands, feet and breast which refused to heal are the silent witnesses of the
passion of the crucified God.They also
remind us that the Paschal Mystery did not end even after the
resurrection.The Paschal Mystery as an
eschatological event happens in the “Eternal Now”.It never ends!That is why we just don’t celebrate the death
of Jesus nor his resurrection as historical events that happened within human
history but rather in and through our paschal character, we enter into it as active participants by making it present
in the “now of our lives” as witnesses.

The resurrection takes the centre stage in the mystery of our faith.
It gives us a reason to hope. When we proclaim these resurrection stories,
we just don’t listen to them as
simply stories but they invite us to enter into the mystery that shaped and
transformed the early Church and the world and still transforming us today.

We believe that we form a “continuum
of the resurrection story” of an "Alleluia People” making present the resurrection in our
world which is continuously transforming our existence into the life of the Crucified
and Risen Christ.